Fratres
by FairMaiden333
Summary: Maybe they were just too much alike, but then - the worst bad blood is always between brothers.


_I always wondered how many people noticed just how alike Yami/Thief King Bakura and the Pharaoh are. Maybe this is my chance to find out - if readers wouldn't mind dropping a review._

_~FairMaiden333 _

_Disclaimer__ - If wishes were horses then I would own Yu-gi-oh… or something like that. _

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><p><em><span>Fratres<span>_

They could have been brothers.

They would never admit it themselves; the person who suggested such an unthinkable idea to either of them would have found himself taking a one-way all-expenses-paid trip to the Shadow Realm. If that person had been the observant kind, the sheer force and depth of the reaction his words had provoked might have told him something.

But then, nobody did ever offer that particular comment. Those close enough to have the opportunity - friends and enemies and partners and long-dead ghosts and even the bright ones who balanced out their darkness - knew better than to take it. But they did have eyes, and they could not avoid seeing how closely the one resembled the other.

The same proud, arrogant tilt of their heads. The same clever, cunning minds that could conceive and carry through so many plans, twisting and turning and tripping up the thoughts of those too slow to follow them. The same great spirits which could bear the burden of a darkness past imagining, hurling near-divine powers at each other when they clashed in battle, fighting and taunting and cursing through the smoke and blood and shuffle of cards and rattle of dice and the sudden, sharp smell of magic. The same childish delight in one-upping their enemies, thoroughly crushing and humiliating any poor fool who dared try to harm them or their other halves, tricking and trapping and playing with their opponents as a cat plays with a mouse; the same smug little smile on their lips saying so clearly _look at me look at me how clever I am and did you ever really think you could win? _and when they stand over a fallen foe, the same glow of savage, delighted triumph to light their eyes.

They are both lost, although the pride of one refuses to let him admit it, and the pride of the other will not let him show the terror he feels. Both cling with a fierce desperation to the ones who set them free from prison; both, when it comes to protecting their precious saviors, will show a complete lack of mercy towards those who lift a finger against them. They, who have lost everything that they were, will not take any chances with what they have found now.

The same wry, wicked sense of humor will send their mouths curling into identical smirks; though they never laugh together. If their lighter halves had ever confided in each other, they would know that they also shared the same guilty pleasures; they both furtively enjoy the odd pillow fight, the really satisfying kind where the feathers get everywhere and half the furniture, material or soul-room, gets overturned, and your hikari ends up hiding under the bed because you got too enthusiastic about that last barrage and set something on fire - though they would sooner die than admit it.

Those who noticed all these things might wonder, what had happened that two so closely akin should be set to fighting each other in a war stretching across centuries of pain and hate and fear? If it was Fate, then what a delicious sense of irony that god must have - to set one king on a throne, honored and adored, and cast the other out to roam friendless through the desert in tattered robes. Each so very, very sure that they were in the right, and each equally determined to let nothing stop them in their personal quest for justice. Both so young in their fiery idealism and youthful energy, and yet made old before their time by blood and betrayal and the weight of a responsibility which became a near obsession, spurred on by their own ambition and righteous anger and the memory of the dead.

No wonder that as they met for the first time, as the huddle of baffled priests stared from one to the other in a near fury of wondering, angry curiosity, that the air between them was humming with tension, each word and gesture and challenging tilt of the head magnified until all the world seemed to hang on the breathless, headlong and inevitable collision of the two young men. Each had found his Nemesis. Something which had been safely abstract and remote had become all too terrifyingly personal, and nothing could ever be the same.

So maybe it only made sense that they hated and mocked and fought and schemed and knocked each other down and gritted their teeth and got back up again and laughed and pretended that it didn't hurt and went over every excruciating inch of the same bitter argument time and time again, dragging out every reason and motive and lie and justification until it degenerated into a simple children's game of name-calling and jeers, pointing with aggrieved indignation and crying out _he started it first. _Maybe they were just too much alike.

And maybe sometimes when the rain falls down from the heavens, those who _know _say quietly amongst themselves that the gods are weeping because two brothers are fighting a war without end.


End file.
